Zio is nothing if not prolific. I’m not sure when he sleeps or if he actually does because he is constantly churning out new work. I wouldn’t necessarily call the rate at which Zio makes work manic, but it’s something close to that term— yet there is a steadiness to it; an ever-present level of enthusiasm that doesn’t seem to wane or go wayward. I’m inclined to assume that much of Zio’s exuberance is a symptom of his youth, and though I do think this to be true to some degree, it wouldn’t be entirely fair to chalk it up to just that. A more deliberate determination resides beneath his fevered, seemingly spontaneous productivity, and this determination reveals his ambition. I think as an artist, Zio wants a lot out of life— big things, far and wide things, the stuff of dreams— and he’s working like a madman to get there. Zio has both a studio and street practice where he creates bold paintings and murals with a distinct tribal-like aesthetic. His paintings are often more colorful than his monochromatic murals but in all his work there are the repeated motifs of primitive patterns, gigantism, and distortion. We visited two of his murals in San Francisco, one on Harrison Street at 5th and the other on Sycamore Street at Mission, both of which are hard to miss. His Mill Valley studio is not just a room, but an entire house filled with finished and unfinished paintings. Walking in for the first time is quite the experience; there is so much to look at, and everything is bright and big and, again, demands your attention. Graffiti has greatly influenced Zio’s mural work as well as his studio practice, he says he likes the idea of “having the boldest spot, an interesting and provocative surface, the most visual traffic, and the fastest read for a piece while still maintaining complexity…”. Zio’s approach is raw and brazen, intuitive and gestural. He leans on instinct readily, working without much of a plan or conscious awareness of content… I suppose almost like the storybook notion of ‘the inspired artist.’ But he acknowledges that this approach has its glitches too, one of them being that he finds it difficult to examine and articulate what his work is about, saying, “It often takes me a while to understand why I’ve painted what I painted… To understand their meaning I have to understand the context in which they were created, which often proves hard because it means understanding myself.”